The Seminarian

Martin Luther King Jr. was a cautious 19-year-old rookie preacher when he left Atlanta, Georgia, to attend seminary up north. At Crozer Theological Seminary, King, or "ML" back then, immediately found himself surrounded by a white staff and white professors. Even his dorm room had once been used by wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Young ML was a prankster and a late-night, chain-smoking pool player who fell in love with a white woman while facing discrimination from students and the locals in the surrounding town of Chester, Pennsylvania. In class, ML performed well, though he developed a habit of plagiarizing that continued throughout his academic career. In his three years at Crozer between 1948 and 1951, King delivered dozens of sermons around the Philadelphia area, had a gun pointed at him (twice) and eventually became student body president. These experiences shaped him into a man ready to take on even greater challenges. The Seminarian is the first definitive, full-length account of King's years as a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary. Long passed over by biographers and historians, this period in King's life is vital to understanding the historical figure he soon became.

With the ever-increasing demands placed on our parish leaders, what can seminaries do to prepare priests to deal with the difficult issues they will face? In addition to formation in priestly spirituality and pastoral care, future pastors require lasting support as they discern the call to priesthood and prepare to enter parish leadership after ordination. Filled with valuable information for supporting seminarians in their ongoing formation, A Seminarian's Toolbox provides practical tools and guidance for achieving best practices in parish leadership. This book is a project of The Leadership Roundtable, a nonprofit organization of Catholic lay leaders, religious, and clergy working together to promote best practices in the formation of clergy and lay leaders in the United States. Learn more at www.LeadershipRoundtable.org.

A novel set in a seminary in rural Spain sometime in the mid-twentieth century, perhaps the 1950s, although it is hard to tell because there are no references to events in the outside world. Our first-person narrator, an orphan, is sent to the seminary partly because he has no where else to go, and partly because he's devout and believes he has a calling. He studies very hard and is in all ways the perfect seminarian until he becomes secret friends with another boy, with whom he falls madly and passionately in love. For good reason, it would seem: the object of his infatuation is a handsome, hunky, not-very-bright romantic fellow who has no qualms about sleeping with his friend, who is both tortured and exhilarated by the nearness of his sweet and beautiful friend. Seeing how the book is set mid-century Spain, in a seminary no less, this illicit love ends tragically, although in a refreshing twist our hero kills his lover rather than himself. The book is intense and atmospheric, and good at capturing the thwarted friendships and desires that occur within the monastic life, both between seminarians and also between teacher (priest) and student.

"The groundbreaking novel by one of the most important twentieth-century American writers--now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart. Introduction by Colm Toibin"--